If I had to guess, the reason would be , that due to the nature of the transaction, and the multiple actors involved, that, from a legal standpoint, they prefer the immutability and distributed nature of a blockchain rather than a leaky old centralised system, which could potentially be gamed with more ease. Not to mention, that there would also be a greater potential for interoperability going forward.
Who's going to be paying to secure this blockchain?Exactly. It amazes me that there are so many people out there (and even here) who still don't get it.
Short answer, the same people that currently pay to run and access the UK land registry. Which is the government, and those that use the services pay for services.
Part of the whole point of their planned fully digital transformation and automation (which may include a "blockchain" (R3 Corda)) is to REDUCE COSTS, and not just for the consumer, but also for the land registry themselves.
Few things to consider.
The UK land registry, for England and Wales alone, before you get into off shore complications, registers about 7.5 trillion in property, with somewhere in the region of £1.5+ trillion in lending secured against it.
It contains around 26 million+ titles, and they process around 3 million amendments a year, and around 19 million access requests a year.
(also worth noting that they paid around £5.3 million out in 2019/2020 alone in fraud and error compensation)
They have around 6,000 - 7000 in staff currently, yes, 6000 - 7000, and they are all housed in buildings/offices... and all of them expect wages.
Lets just see ... what do we suppose the current annual costs are ? want to take a guess?
For ease lets just look at the staff and say that at MINIMUM they earn £20,000 a year across the board, let alone the managers etc... but anyway lets see , say 6500 staff X £20,000 = £130,000,000 a YEAR on STAFF alone, and in reality that figure is likely much higher due to higher pay grades... ok, and then you have to house them somewhere...
Anyways, I had a quick look and basically their continued operating costs for a year are about £250,000,000
whilst they pull in income of around £320,000,000 a year
I am not sure if people imagine a quiet little office somewhere with an elderly clerk sat on her own processing a land registry request or two a day....
So, the idea I believe is that they partner with various established players within the industry , in conveyancing, legal, HMRC, banks etc... and these guys who participate will/can run nodes to support the chain, and so the cost will be shared by them (and they will reduce their margins, and increase their profit by doing so)
The idea, that , it will be cheaper to maintain, than the current system(s) , more easily accessible, much much faster/streamlined, and far less prone to being gamed/defrauded.
Given their operating costs as they are, and their revenues... they have plenty of opportunity to trim their overheads, and that is in part their goal of becoming fully digitised and automated. Which will of course eventually reduce staff and operation costs (buildings and all the rest)
Is this the same as running the land registry on the BTC or ..... another public chain..... or with NFTs?
No
However, the idea would be that there will be some levels of interoperability going forward, and say a BTC investor could post collateral using BTC, purchase a property through a crypto supporting mortgage company, and then purchase, and have recorded their title deed and the like on the land registry R3 Corda chain, and then later be able to call that record back and use it when they potentially want to fractionalise some equity in their property , and get paid in a crypto... R3 is interoperable.
Is any of this right this second using NFTS or a form of?, no, will it ever , maybe so.... maybe not, its not the most outlandish of ideas, and its hardly "science fiction, 100s of years in the future" , far from it, its quite a mundane , straight forward , easy to grasp , pretty intuitive,
possibility. ps that being said I would not be surprised if R3 is already using a form of "NFT" to record unique, non fungible assets within their ledger... and no I am not talking about a jpeg, pixel art "useless" NFTs, but rather "useful NFTs""
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